Watch French TV in the UK

However much I pretend to myself, my French is simply not quite good enough for many everyday situations. Sure, if you catch me on a Saturday night outside the cafe-tabac after a few glasses of red then that conviction is much greater.  Yet, put me in front of anybody to try and deal with anything administrative or financial and it’s not long before I resort to loud English and hand gestures.  As I want to retire to France in the not too distant future, improving my French would obviously make life an awful lot easier.

Watch French TV in England

I’ve been told that it’s actually very useful to just try and watch more French TV when in England. However that’s not always straight forward, mainly due to the scourge of the traveler – geo-blocking. This is the technology which is used by the vast majority of online media sites to restrict access based on your location. For TV sites this usually means blocking access to anyone outside their domestic market.

It’s of course, the same issue I and many others face when trying to enjoy the BBC iPlayer or ITV Hub in France. All the UK TV stations are only available online when you’re in the UK. Unfortunately all the French TV media sites like 6 Play do exactly the same in reverse.

The reason is unclear? Something about program rights, copyright laws etc, probably more about making money from overseas markets, I guess. The reality is that you won’t be able to watch any broadcasts and any shows which includes the News and Match of the Day at all from France. Just as when I get back to the UK I can’t improve my French by watching some French TV on their channels either.

TV Stations and Geo-Blocking

The method used is to simply look up the nationality of your IP address when you connect. Sounds a bit racist to me, so if it’s not from the UK you get blocked or routed through to a different area. Same thing happens if I try and stream from https://www.6play.fr/ when I’m back in the UK.

It’s concerning as most big TV stations broadcast online nowadays, meaning you can watch just as easily on your computer/laptop as on a normal TV set. Indeed, the BBC were actually a pioneer in this field with an application called the BBC iPlayer. All the other UK TV stations have followed suit and have their own versions, the ITV one is called the ITV hub. I used these sites all the time in the UK on my laptop, simply because I didn’t need to have a TV set in every room.

So the fact that if you visit these sites from another country outside the UK – e.g., France then you’ll get a nasty surprise – i.e., if you try and view abroad, they don’t work.

Watching French TV Stations like M6 Replay in UK

There is fortunately a solution to watch French TV in England which you can see in the following video:

NordVPN Discount Page

So that’s it really, what you are doing is simply hiding your real IP address, i.e., the British one, by relaying your internet connection via a VPN server based in the UK. It works beautifully and gives you full access to all the French TV channels I’ve tested. Remember though all other aspects of your browsing will be switched to France while you are connected – e.g., French based search results, routed to FR Amazon and so on.

The video demonstrates a VPN services called Identity Cloaker which I used for many years – it’s still a good product and is very reliable which you can find here – Identity Cloaker. However it’s kind of old fashioned and works best for the PC – if you want to install on different devices like phones, tablets etc – then I now use something called NordVPN which supports most platforms. It’s also quite a bit cheaper if you subscribe to one of the longer packages if that suits you.

Using a VPN to Watch French TV Outside France

What are the drawbacks? Well, the main one is obviously you have to pay someone to run these servers, so there is a subscriptions cost although it’s not very much. For me being able to watch the news on BBC every evening when I’m in France it’s definitely worth it. Using the exact same program when I’m back in the UK to access French TV is an added bonus. Hopefully this will become more and more valuable the better my French language skills become.

Can You Use Any VPN?

A few years back it didn’t really matter which VPN service you used. As long as they had servers in the right country that was pretty much it. So if you wanted to watch M6 Replay outside France you’d need French servers, the BBC needed UK servers and so on. Most of the decent VPN services had plenty of servers in most developed countries so it didn’t much matter which one you chose.

Unfortunately over the last few years this situation has changed. These workarounds have become extremely popular literally used by millions all over the world. As such the media companies like the BBC, France 24, TVMonde and M6 have started to block the many VPN connections in order to limit the unauthorized access.

This doesn’t mean that VPNs no longer work to bypass these restrictions. It does however mean that many of the VPNs in the market now no longer work for bypassing these geo-blocks. This largely depends on which channel you’re trying to access – the worst for blocking VPNs are the British and US sites. The BBC for example has blocked a significant proportion of the commercial VPN services. The good news is that French TV channels don’t seem so aggressive in blocking access so many more VPNs will work with them.

Check Your VPN/TV Channel

So the most important factor to consider when choosing a VPN for accessing a TV channel is that it’s not blocked. Generally most VPNs will be pretty honest about access if you ask them, but the decent ones have 30 day money back guarantees so you can check yourself. Probably the most restrictive is the BBC iPlayer – so if you want access to this as well as French TV make sure it’s supported.

Otherwise, the other key factor is speed, if the French based server is fast then you’ll not really notice any difference. However, connect through to one a slow or overloaded VPN servers and you will unfortunately find your web speed will plummet and videos will need to buffer every so often.

Check Your TV Channels

At this point I should do a little update because much of the information on the web especially on YouTube is out of date. In times gone by you could use something called a proxy to access UK TV stations. I can still see videos online which suggest that you can use free ones that are available.

Although it’s true that there are free proxy servers and they can potentially hide your location, there is a slight problem. For the vast majority of online TV stations these free proxies no longer work. You can’t use them to watch French TV online and you definitely cannot use them to watch things like the BBC iPlayer. . Forget basic proxy servers to watch French TV online, they are blocked automatically by all the main media sites.

In fact,even many of the VPN (Virtual Private Network) services have also been blocked so check with a short trial before you subscribe to a service. The ones that still work are those marketed as VPN security services not BBC TV watching programs. Don’t expect to see the TV watching functionality advertised on their websites, you’ll need to email/message them directly.

The Perfect VPN for French TV in 2024

In 2022, you’ll need a fast, secure VPN service to watch French and UK TV online. You’ll also need to set up an account on most of these services however that’s not normally an issue – just fill in the details and use a valid UK postcode when prompted. Some time ago ITV Hub also started checking the nationality of your computer – damn Brexit, although I’m not sure if they still do this. If you get problems with ITV got to control panel and just change your region/locale to UK and your time zone to GMT.

So that’s it, our recommendation for a VPN service for watching French TV is NordVPN. It’s probably the fastest VPN available and it supports the vast majority of TV channels which operate geo-blocks. The basic subscription has use the same trick to watch other online TV stations. You can catch Premier League Football on some of the US and Canadian sites, switch to the US version of Netflix (much better than all European ones) as well as enjoying all UK TV stations. Go and have an explore, I actually watched a whole match of Gaelic football transmitted on RTE (Ireland’s national broadcaster) by simply selecting and Irish server instead.

The software is very easy to use, and you can also use it on other devices and you don’t need to set up the connection manually as you do with many VPN services..

So, if you’re missing the best of TV online just because you’re in the wrong country, then the solution is simple. Just grab a low cost, super-fast VPN service to secure your internet connection and bypass all these blocks and restrictions online in 2024.